Showdown

By Matt Rees/Jerusalem

Yasser Arafat likes his helicopters. Real leaders, military leaders especially, get around by helicopter, and nothing suited the style of the khaki-clad Palestinian boss better than dropping in and out of places with a backdrop of rotors loudly beating, whipping up the air. Choppering between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Arafat's two disconnected realms, had the added advantage of sparing the Palestinian leader the humiliation of passing through Israeli checkpoints on the ground below.

But the three Soviet-made Mi8s that were parked at Arafat's compound in the Gaza Strip are in pieces now, destroyed by Israeli missiles in retaliation for a shocking new round of suicide bombings that killed 25 Israelis in the two days before. The Israelis also shot up various facilities of Arafat's Palestinian Authority, deployed troops and armor within striking distance of the office in the West Bank city of Ramallah where Arafat was working, and later bombed the same bureau. It was a bit like the magician's trick of tossing knives so that they just miss the target. Israel's message to Arafat was clear: we brought you here, and we can take you out.

This is what it has come to. After eight years of on-and-off attempts to make peace with the Palestinians through Arafat, the Israelis have officially declared him, in effect, nothing but a terrorist. The U.S., which had moved considerably in Arafat's direction in recent years, has made it clear it is no longer interested in trying to cool the Israelis' blood. The Israelis swore they weren't actually going to kill Arafat, but they were threatening him with something he's apt to dread as much: irrelevance. With the U.S. behind Israel, the threat was real, more real than any other Arafat has faced since his triumphant return home from exile in 1994, following the historic Oslo peace accords. Says a U.S. official: "We are now trying to create a moment of truth for Arafat."

The latest deterioration in relations began on Saturday night, Dec. 1, when two Palestinian bombers struck a busy cluster of cafes along a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, killing 10 Israelis, not one of them older than 21. The next day, another terrorist blew himself up on a bus in the northern city of Haifa, killing 15 riders, mostly old people. The perpetrators--as well as the bomber who exploded outside a Jerusalem hotel on Wednesday, killing himself alone and blowing his head through a window of the establishment's fifth floor--were from the militant Islamic organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad rather than factions loyal to Arafat. But because of his lenient treatment of those groups during the current 14-month-long intifadeh, Arafat is held accountable by Israel for their terrorism. "We regard Mr. Arafat as guilty of everything," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told TIME late last week.

When Israel struck back with helicopter gunships and warplanes, killing 23 Palestinians over the course of the week, Arafat fled his Ramallah office and hid at another, undisclosed location. The loss of his choppers left him pinned down in Ramallah, unable to move to his main Gaza headquarters or anywhere else. Still, the Israeli army made clear it was only playing around, so far. "Pyrotechnics," a senior army officer called the attack on the helicopters. "It's a show for the television and public opinion."

The weekend suicide bombings had caught Sharon in Washington, but his meeting with President Bush on Dec. 2 enabled him to return home in a strong position. Until the latest bombings, the Administration had stuck to a policy of calling on the Israelis for restraint in their reactions to Palestinian provocations. This time, that demand was conspicuously not uttered. The change was read on all sides as a dramatic shift for Washington, placing the U.S. seemingly behind attacks on the Palestinian Authority and its infrastructure. Even the Israeli feints toward Arafat did not precipitate U.S. umbrage, though Washington did extract a commitment that Sharon would not kill him.

The Administration's cold stand is rooted in deep frustration with Arafat, going back to his dismissal of a peace offer by Israel at the Camp David talks in July 2000. "The son of a bitch was too stupid to take it," an Administration official groused recently. The Administration, prodded by Secretary of State Colin Powell, had softened a little on Arafat lately, lending U.S. support to the idea of a Palestinian state and initiating a new round of diplomacy aimed at a cease-fire and eventually new peace talks. But the weekend attacks were seen--rightly or wrongly--as a slap in the face, and not just by the White House, which is known to distrust Arafat, but by Powell as well.

With Sharon back in Jerusalem, ministers of his national-unity government met into early Tuesday morning. Right-wingers were buoyed by Washington's stance; they figured the U.S. experience with Osama bin Laden was finally sinking in. This was their chance, they felt, to label Arafat the terrorist they had always taken him for, to declare officially the Palestinian Authority to be a sponsor of terrorism, just as the U.S. had indicted the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is not just extremists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad who have slaughtered Israelis during the intifadeh; Arafat's militias have taken their share of the kills, even though Arafat says he's against the shooting and bombing.

The rightists argued for hours with ministers from the relatively dovish Labor Party who didn't want to burn Israel's bridges to the man with whom they had co-signed the Oslo accords. At 1:30 a.m. last Tuesday, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, of Labor, tried to convince Sharon that the government didn't need to make a declaration linking Arafat to terrorism. Instead it could just carry on with its military actions, as it had done throughout the intifadeh. Sharon thumped his fist on the table. "Arafat's giving shelter to terrorists and financing terrorism," he said. "Those are the facts, and there's no way to ignore it. We have to convince the entire world."

But first Sharon had to convince his Cabinet. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who like Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize for his part in the now disintegrating Oslo accords, argued angrily that it would only make things worse to declare that Arafat was sponsoring terrorism. "Somebody could understand from this that it's O.K. to kill Arafat," Peres said. "I'm not asking for Arafat's life," Sharon said. "I'm talking about forcing him to take responsibility."

The Cabinet agreed to leave room in its decision to change its mind later, if Arafat did start to crack down on the terrorists. Still, when it came time to vote on the statement that Arafat's Authority "supports terrorism," the Labor ministers walked out. The Cabinet declared Force 17, one of Arafat's security units, and the Tanzim, the militia wing of his Fatah Party, "terrorist organizations" that "will be acted against accordingly."

Those steps have already begun. Cabinet ministers tell TIME the Israeli army has been ordered to produce a plan for tougher military actions against the Palestinian Authority in case Arafat doesn't play ball. Sources close to Sharon say that the Prime Minister has begun secret talks with the National Religious Party and other right-wing factions that may enter his coalition if Labor quits.

A right-wing coalition would make things easier for Sharon in the Cabinet room, and in any case Israelis are moving swiftly toward the right as the violence of the intifadeh continues. In a poll last week in Israel's biggest newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, 53% of Israelis surveyed said they believed Arafat should be deposed, while 24% thought the Palestinian leader should be killed. But Sharon remembers the divisions that shattered Israeli society when a right-wing government, in which he was the Defense Minister, took the army into Lebanon in 1982 without left-wing support, and when a left-wing government signed a peace deal with Arafat and ignored the views of the right. Sharon is proud of the coalition between Likud and Labor and is committed to working to keep it intact.

What happens next depends mainly on Arafat. By the end of last week his forces had arrested 180 Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists, but only five of them were from the 33-person wanted list Israel had drawn up. Those around the Chairman were making excuses for why he wasn't acting more aggressively. They argued that the strictures Israel continues to place on Palestinians, preventing free movement between Palestinian cities and access to jobs in Israel, create a climate in which it is politically dicey for Arafat to do Israel's bidding. Last week Palestinians spat on Arafat's policemen when they came to arrest Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists. In Gaza's Zeitoun neighborhood, police put Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin under house arrest and then had to deal with two days of riots. One young Hamas supporter died from a wound sustained in a clash with Palestinian police. Says Saeb Erakat, Arafat's chief peace negotiator: "Sharon is tying Arafat's hands and legs and blindfolding him. Then he's pushing him into the sea and telling the whole world, 'Look, he can't swim, so he's not a partner.'"

The Palestinian leader didn't seem to be in the mood for appeasing critics. The point man for the U.S. with Arafat is Anthony Zinni, Powell's newly appointed special envoy for the Middle East. Arafat so far is not taken with the retired general. "He treats me like a soldier who's supposed to obey orders," Arafat told aides after their first meeting. Another mediator who failed to bond with Arafat last week was Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher. Usually, Arafat counts on Egypt to support his positions, but this time the Palestinians didn't like what Maher had to say. In a three-hour meeting with Arafat on Thursday, Maher told him his Fatah faction was linked too closely in international eyes with the terrorists of Hamas. "You have to dissociate yourself from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, so we can defuse the Israeli aggression," Maher said, according to an Arafat aide who was present. "You have a problem with the Americans, the Israelis and with us. We can't support you as long as you are besieged by Islamists."

Arafat had one friendly visitor last week--an Israeli at that. Tamar Gozansky, a member of the Israeli Parliament from the leftist Hadash Party, met with him Tuesday evening in Ramallah. Arafat was in a somber spirit, she said, quiet and tired. He told her he thought Israel was exploiting the deeds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to destroy him. Arafat smiled only once, Gozansky said; that was when she told him she hadn't given up her belief in the peace process. It wasn't clear whether he grinned in appreciation, or out of amusement at her naivete.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington and Jamil Hamad and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem